


Blood From a Stone, Sense From A River

by skellerbvvt



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Long Suffering Bucky, Magic Steve - Freeform, snackfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-24 07:41:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18566920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skellerbvvt/pseuds/skellerbvvt
Summary: Steve, in Bucky's informed opinion, was too himself to be anything else. If there were some kinda Steve magic, then Steve would be the most powerful version in the world.And yet.





	Blood From a Stone, Sense From A River

Steve was:   
-too stubborn to be a good mage   
-too poor to be a druid  
-too creative to be a wizard   
-too moral to be a good warlock   
-too shrimpy to be a hero   
-too honest to be a decent illusionist   
-too male to be a witch   
-not quite religious enough to be a priest  
-far too religious to be a summoner.   
  
Steve, in Bucky's informed opinion, was too himself to be anything else. If there were some kinda Steve magic, then Steve would be the most powerful version in the world. 

And yet.  
  
He had an artistic skill that could take him any damn direction he wanted. Bucky could draw fairly well, but he always got a little lost in the middle when he changed his mind about what he wanted.   
  
Steve knew what he wanted to start with and that's what he ended with. And there, see? He had the right amount of willpower, you couldn't get that from just anybody. if magic was just about will then Stevie had it in spades. Hell, diamonds, hearts, and clubs as well, why not?

Sure, Bucky’s got a sister who’s a witch. She’s just got porch kinda magic now, but there was something distant about her when she was born, and no amount of braiding her hair and reading her books was gonna change it. She was dreamy and thoughtful and one step outside of life. Steve? Steve found the thickest part of life and planted his feet like a fucking tree that grew out a river out of sheer cussedness.

Sarah Rogers, Steve's beloved and departed mother, had had a healing edge to her touch. It didn't get them too far, but in a world of influenza, wood alcohol poisoning and babies dying because their babysitters washed their bottles in Lysol, she'd turned a few hopeless tides. By all rights, Steve should have turned grey in his crib, but here he was, vibrating with a lot of life and not a lick of it going anywhere but down that road paved with good intentions in a handbasket, with Bucky along for the ride.

The trick with Sarah, in Bucky's opinion, was that she'd had some give. People died, and all she could do was bully a few coroners into making sure they got the right thing on their death certificates for their families. She'd known when to step up to the pitch and when to let someone else bat for a thousand.   
  
Steve's steady. He's got a bottomless supply of stubborn. Folk’d find donkeys with more good will. The kind of stubborn those clean shaven, slicked fellas up there on podiums standing behind their employers just wished they could touch. The kind those rich-jeweled dames with the cupid bow lips and long coils of hair, standing on the arms of fellas putting their friends in office, would bleed good blood for.  
  
But there wasn't an ounce of give to it. Bucky knew what fights you had to fight and which ones just ended up your good blood smoked on someone else's alter. Steve didn't understand the concept of "tactical retreat."

And yet:  
  
Steve could sometimes make that work for him.

(“Hey, you mind knocking it off?” Steve had said at the group of teenagers trying to flip the skirt of the owner's daughter, looking scrubbed down to her last nerve. “Some of us are trying to eat, here.”

“How about you mind yourself, buddy?” One of them had said, hair slicked down, sporting shiny new shoes and the smirk of a kid whose parents had scraped him out of plenty of borrowed trouble. “She your little Pole girlfriend, huh?”

Steve had stood up, all five foot and a whisper of him. Bucky had put down the change for the coffee and it was their first dinner out in three months, because Bucky couldn't take Steve anywhere. Except maybe the stars were aligned, or the waitress has to spark in her blood that set Steve's pyre alight, because the boys went a little grey, ducked their heads, and saw themselves off with a muttered excuse.)

Most times it was Bucky finding Steve in some state of beat to Sam Hill and back, bristled up about taking any kind of charity or nursing, ranting about unions or the state of the union onions, maybe. Maybe the price of being alive due to too much mend magic was that the thought of being nursed was inexcusable in your head from then on. Bucky would sit down in their one chair with his suspenders down and his shirt sleeves up and ask after where he couldn't show his face again.

(“If you'd loosen up your morals a little you could be a pretty smooth blood mage." Bucky said once. “At least when they bleed a sawbuck in an alley they get a demon out of it."

Steve had wiped at his mouth. “You got anything helpful to say?”

Bucky had turned on the radio, because there was a game and because you had to save your worry about Steve for when it was going to do some good.

“I'm just wondering if you’re trying to blood bond with all the strays in the borough is all. Shooting to be the Rat King of New York.”)

Steve's got himself a vision of the future in his head and it stayed there, no matter how the world crashed in around him. That wasn't how magic worked. You had to find a break in the world and slip yourself inside it. It’s how Bucky’s sister worked, one foot already out of the daily grind. If ends had to meet, she’d made ‘em.

Steve had never met a problem he didn't figure he could solve by throwing himself at it, which, sure, worked if the problem was he needed more practice at his figure drawing and he put himself down in front of a shop mirror and drew a thousand terrifying versions of himself until there was a person staring back.   
  
Or if the problem was him getting into fine arts and the illustration program accepting him with no money and a lot of slightly stained sketchbooks. And then Steve had battered his body at the gate of lawful employment drawing pencil thin eyebrows on models for make-up ads. Maybe they figured anybody as stubborn as Steve was bound to put a little of that in his pen and get some sales up.

(“You should do some eight-pagers.” Bucky said, once, doing the dishes while Steve soaked up what little natural light he could get, halfway up the fire escape. “Guys at the dock say you can get a few dollars a book if you get in with the right crowd.”

Steve had huffed, the only thing visible his feet danging out into the world. “Seems to me there's enough of that sort of thing in the world.”

“What, and we don't have enough superheroes? The eight hundred Supermans out there aren't quite enough?”

“Never enough heroes in the world,” Steve said in the stubborn-stone way that meant if Steve was any kind of mage, it was a little bit away from being a spell. But you couldn't bash magic into the world. That's why they'd had a Chemist's War, after all. Chemicals worked when you needed them to. Millenia of magic bleeding out magic, and then some smuck had figured out mustard gas and the whole world burned.)

Bucky had some magic that didn't tend to leave the barriers of his skin, much. Wasn’t his sister, that was for sure. She got a job uptown and he got a job where they paid for muscle. He could light a dame's cigarette. He could get his hair just right. He could make his clothes last and stain free.  He could usually find a bit more energy at the bottom of his gut when he needed it. Nothing more than street magic. Buskers on a corner could pull a few more coins out of pockets kind of magic. Newsies with voices a little louder than the crowd kinda magic.

(Used to be that you'd get magic based off what kind of bones were buried under your country's borders, but America is a nation of blood. Spilling it. Mixing it. Letting it rain down in meaningless trails across all kinds of borders. So now it's bit all  _Anything Goes_ highlighting bright on Broadway.  _Innovation Triumphs Over Tradition_  say the billboards.  _Don't Let Old Blood Decide Your New Tomorrow!_  said the ads.

On one hand, you had a Promised Land where no blood had been spilled, and other hand you had America which was a land of a lotta promises. After that last war, Bucky's pretty sure there's not an inch of dirt that doesn't have a grand of blood-soaked in.

But used to be, Ireland was a place of story magic. Of tear magic. Of get down deep in your family’s blood and make somebody  _hurt_  kinda magic. Maybe that’s the trick of it, because Bucky’s wanted plenty of people to pay, but all Steve’s wanted is for folks to  _do better_.)

Steve was meant for Great Things, in Bucky's opinion. Assuming he lived long enough to get to them. Hard to tell if he'd do Great Things, or Great Things would eat him up and spit out the bones.   
  
This is all just to say, that when Bucky was laid up with Science, trussed up to the gills with all the World Of Tomorrow he could stand pounding in the blood he used to trust, and there came Steve burning brighter than any man had any damn right to, Bucky wasn't what you'd call  _surprised_.   
  
("Magic or science?" Bucky asked.

“They said science,” Steve informed when it wasn’t just the two of them, but nobody else was paying much mind. “There was a serum. And a tank. Something called Vita-Rays?”

“Sure,” Bucky had said because in serials it didn’t matter if you had a dragon or a spaceship, the hero always got his way in the end.)

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my Tumblr drafts for probably 5 years.


End file.
